I haven’t spent so much time in Facebook lately. I wrote a post about how it was becoming boring. But in the last few weeks Facebook – or at least my view of Facebook – seems to be changing as more advanced applications continiue to be developed and deployed. Above you can see a screenshot of my Facebook wall this morning. No longer is it dominated by status updates. In fact I am not even sure they are being displayed on the wall. Instead it is recording my friends interactions with different goups and through different applications. The problem is I am not usre this is any better.

I suppose it is useful to know that Josie attended BarcampUKGovewb and Mobile Geeks of London III. I didn’t know about those events -and it gives links to find out more. That Lou and Paul have joined a group called ELESIG is not so helpful. I don’t know what ELESIG is. But as for the Twitter and Jaiku information – that is really useless. Josie says – “I did put up a nice wallpaper. That must count for something?” And Ewen is just about to pull out of Manchester station and will lose his wifi link! These are fragments of conversations about which I have no context to understand. Just for the record – I ahve no interest whatosever in custom cars or in pictures of them.

I guess that the problem lies in the plugins I have installed and in my settings. But the problem is that as Facebook becomes more sophisticated to get much out of it takes considerable time and effort. The original selling point was that it was so easy to use. And of course as our ‘friends’ have increased – so has the noise. My feeling is that to be of much use they are going to have ot allow us to form groups of friends and to display activity within those groups seperately. Perhaps then I could understand what is going on in the block of cyberspace that facebook represents.

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on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 17:48 and is filed under Social Software, Wales Wide Web.
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Open Educational Resources

BYU researcher John Hilton has published a new study on OER, student efficacy, and user perceptions – a synthesis of research published between 2015 and 2018. Looking at sixteen efficacy and twenty perception studies involving over 120,000 students or faculty, the study’s results suggest that students achieve the same or better learning outcomes when using OER while saving a significant amount of money, and that the majority of faculty and students who’ve used OER had a positive experience and would do so again.

Digital Literacy

A National Survey fin Wales in 2017-18 showed that 15% of adults (aged 16 and over) in Wales do not regularly use the internet. However, this figure is much higher (26%) amongst people with a limiting long-standing illness, disability or infirmity.

A new Welsh Government programme has been launched which will work with organisations across Wales, in order to help people increase their confidence using digital technology, with the aim of helping them improve and manage their health and well-being.

Digital Communities Wales: Digital Confidence, Health and Well-being, follows on from the initial Digital Communities Wales (DCW) programme which enabled 62,500 people to reap the benefits of going online in the last two years.

Figures from the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency show that in total almost 11,500 people – both academics and support staff – working in universities on a standard basis were on a zero-hours contract in 2017-18, out of a total staff head count of about 430,000, reports the Times Higher Education. Zero-hours contract means the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours

Separate figures that only look at the number of people who are employed on “atypical” academic contracts (such as people working on projects) show that 23 per cent of them, or just over 16,000, had a zero-hours contract.

Resistance decreases over time

Interesting research on student centered learning and student buy in, as picked up by an article in Inside Higher Ed. A new study published in PLOS ONE, called “Knowing Is Half the Battle: Assessments of Both Student Perception and Performance Are Necessary to Successfully Evaluate Curricular Transformation finds that student resistance to curriculum innovation decreases over time as it becomes the institutional norm, and that students increasingly link active learning to their learning gains over time